Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Mining your networks for a cause


The way of the world is meeting people through other people.
  - Robert Kerrigan


Social media buzz – loads of fun, keeping up with friends, updating your resume, posting pics of the kids. But where’s the value? I have a real-life case study of the value of my LinkedIn network. I hosted a Corporate Event Marketing Association event in Austin and, not knowing a whole lot of event marketers in the area, I began leveraging the network.
First, I posted about the event to my network, and asked them to share with their network.
Next I started using the search bar to locate networked friends of mine in Austin, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio.
After that, I searched on the terms of interest like Events, Tradeshows, A/V, and other key terms.
LinkedIn doesn’t let you spam people you don’t know, nor does it let you put a URL in a message to people not in your network. But it does let you send an invitation to connect. Through LinkedIn, I was able to connect with more than 50 people who were not originally in my network to invite them to the event. And in the process, got 50 new connections in my world to share information with in the future!
I absolutely do not advocate spamming random people. But if your goal is to build real connections or a tight community of like-minded folks, using the network of your network you already have is priceless!

Friday, December 16, 2011

Thank you, American Airlines

The average American is nothing if not patriotic.
  - Herbert Croly

While sitting on an American Airlines flight on my way to a site visit to Vegas, I witnessed something that warmed my heart. Say what you will about the airlines, but I just saw a flight attendant gift a U.S. Army serviceman an upgrade to first class when there was a seat left. I absolutely love seeing things like that! Congratulations to American Airlines for considering our servicemen and women, and thank you to those who serve our country!

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Why I love hotels.


I stayed in a really old hotel last night. They sent me a wake-up letter.
  - Steven Wright   
 
I love hotels. I have always loved hotels. I have wonderful memories of checking into a hotel with my parents, my dad handing me the ice bucket, and sending me on my mission: locate the ice machine and bring back a full bucket. I really don’t remember my parents ever using the ice, but it was a very important mission for me.
As an event marketer, I have the pleasure of really nice hotel rooms during site visits, and really bad lower-than-run-of-the-house rooms during the actual event or during regular travels. No matter the hotel, no matter the property level, there are a few things that I just love about hotels. Some may sound like pet peeves, but it’s these qualities and features that I find endearing about hotels!
Behold my photo essay. 

The Kleenex flower.
Why do I have a flower made of tissue on top of my tissue box? When I need a tissue, it’s usually because I sneezed or actually just need a tissue. With the tissue flower, I have to pull out the massive lump of tissue that is now unusable because someone else touched it and crumpled it together so I can’t easily get a single tissue from it. My favorite was the time when I removed the tissue flower only to discover a completely different color of tissue in the rest of the box. I was given a “previously owned” tissue flower! Ew!





The little shampoo and conditioner and lotion. 


Of course the lotion is only in the nicer of the hotels. More recently, hotels have begun renaming things from the mundane “Shampoo” and “Conditioner” to the more glamorous – and frankly confusing – “Hair Revitalizer” and “Hair Protectant”  or "Hair Mask." If you have to think for more than two seconds to determine if they are actually shampoo and conditioner, then it’s too complicated for the guests.



Free coffee. 


Why is the coffee free, but the water is $7?








The magnifying mirror. 


I love this thing. I do not actually own one at home, but when I go to a hotel, I look forward to checking out my giant pores and random eyebrow growths at ridiculously intensely magnified levels.









The wake-up call. 


Since I can never trust that the alarm clock is set, I really like this service. I especially love it when it’s a real person who tells you good morning and offers the weather for the day. I do not love it when it is 15 minutes late, which leads me now to always use my phone alarm clock as a 5-minute back-up to my wake-up call.



The phone in the toilet room. 


Has anyone ever used this phone? I don’t know, and that is exactly why I will never touch it. What kind of phone calls have they had on the toilet? Were really amazing business deals lost or won from this phone?






The TV in the bathroom. 


I don’t watch TV in the mornings when I’m getting dressed. Nor do I have a TV in my bathroom. This is exactly why I always use the TV in the bathroom in hotels that offer this feature.






The remote to the bedroom television.


The things this device has seen… oh lordy. Why don’t they put a protective cover on it? Much like the toilet phone, I cringe when I touch this remote. I believe I will add a plastic bag to my travel carrier to protect myself from this going forward. Brilliant.








Non-HDTV. 


And along the lines of this remote are the HD televisions in all the hotels without a single HD channel. So I get to watch my favorite Seinfeld episodes all squished and out of proportion. And why does it take so long for the channels to change? What’s up with that?






The stationary.


When was the last time you wrote an actual letter. When was the last time you wrote an actual letter on hotel stationary? I actually remember the last time I did this: I was 13 years old and in a city in Japan. I wrote a letter to myself about my trip using the hotel stationary. Now I check to make sure it’s in the drawer when I get to the hotel. It provides comfort.








The Gideon Bible. 


More important than the hotel stationary, this item must be in my nightstand drawer. If I am in a hotel that the Gideons have not visited, I go online and report it to the Gideons immediately. I’m not kidding.









What are you favorite things about hotels?

Monday, December 12, 2011

Conference justification letters


The most important persuasion tool you have in your entire arsenal is integrity. 
  - Zig Ziglar
I’m seeing a lot of conference justification letters around the internet these days. I like the concept: provide a ready-made letter for managers to understand the benefits of sending their employee to a conference. But the execution of a lot of these letters is cheesy and pure marketing language.
I have also seen some really awesome ones, though they border on something a little too formal for an employee to hand to their boss.
When preparing a form letter for your attendees to use, consider the audience. This isn’t a brochure. This is a real, active letter of persuasion and value proposition for a manager or finance team to evaluate whether the money should be invested in sending a person to this engagement. It feels incredibly silly to type this, but consider what you would need to convince your management to go to an event. I found one industry conference justification letter that pointed out the evening events, the bands that were playing, and the opening pool party and reception. Really? Not helpful.
Be brief, but impactful. Don’t talk about the parties and don’t over-talk about the networking. Networking is a key reason anyone goes to an industry conference, but education, uncovering opportunities for sales or new vendors, and bringing back knowledge and perspectives to coworkers.
If you’re going to build a conference justification letter, be sure you also send out conference notes and key take-aways to your attendees so they can show the true value of the content they just experienced.

Friday, October 28, 2011

The complexities of your event mobile app

Please all, and you will please none.
   - Aesop

What do we want out of a mobile app for our event? 
  • Feedback (surveys)
  • Engagement with content or people (QR codes, connections, check-ins)
  • Maps of venues
  • Agendas, especially if they are personalized
  • Notifications from partners or updates to agendas
  • Partner content
  • To work on iPhone, Android and Win 7 phones
And then there's all the random stuff we might want to add: games, rewards, etc.

I haven't found any off-the-shelf solutions to meet all of these needs, but have worked with some custom design companies to get us what we want. With mixed results.

My recommendation is: Choose your vendor well.

Vet their personality as a company - are they willing to work insane hours to meet your goals? Are they willing to partner with you to allow your event to shine? Are they willing to be onsite to help if anything goes wrong? Do they intend to work with you again, and will they support you throughout the build and implementation process to ensure you want to work with them? Have they ever gotten apps approved through the four majors marketplaces (iPhone, Android, Windows, Blackberry)? How many have they done? Can they code in such a way that even after the app is approved and in the marketplaces, a few tweaks can still be made?

Be careful as you get into mobile app development for your events to determine why you are doing and what you hope to gain. Apps are awesome and they are fun and they are cool, but usage rates are still relatively low for the majority of event participants. Some have corporate phones that prevent them downloading apps. Some are on Blackberry and can't get any cool features. Some prefer paper. Some just prefer to save their battery for more important things.

To do an app right, you need to have amazing content. If your intent is to meet the minimum requirements of app-coolness, pick an agency that will load in your agenda for you. If you actually plan to have loads of cool info in the app, ensure that you have the internal resources to gather, edit, and manage the inclusion of the killer content.

Have a plan for the future. The first thing I do after an event is usually remove the app from my phone. That's 3MB-6MB my phone doesn't need on it! So if you expect me to keep your app on my phone, tell me why and then make sure it's something I want to keep. Just about all the conferences I've been to in the last 2 years have changed app vendors year over year, making me download the new app anyway.

Perhaps there are other methods you could pursue - like leveraging LinkedIn or Facebook. Or perhaps going with an event social network like a Vivastream or  SocialGo.

So when it comes to signing up for an event mobile app: think before you ink! :-)

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

CEMA Forum: Austin - 9/19 Roundup

Everyone has a 'risk muscle.' You keep it in shape by trying new things. If you don't, it atrophies. Make a point of using it at least once a day.

  - Roger Von Oech quotes
 
I was thrilled to have the opportunity to host the Corporate Event Marketing Association's first regional event with content in Austin, Texas on September 19th. CEMA is a California-based industry association for corporate event marketers, primarily in the high tech sector, but expanding to other corporate areas as well. The majority of our regional events have been social in nature, so we tried an experiment with a half day of content at the W Austin Hotel. Nearly 50 attendees from all over the country joined us!


Our day began with a roundtable lunch with table topics that attendees selected when they registered. Gathered together by a common interest, conversation could flow freely at the table. By all accounts, few tables actively pursued their table topics, but having a common interest to seat attendees together was a great start to the day.

I kicked off the meeting with my favorite reminder of corporate life: Dave Grady's The Conference Call.

THANK YOU
Carlson Marketing was our underwriter for the event, and they shared a great video about their services. Opus Solutions managed registration for our event. PSAV supported us spectacularly with their A/V set and personnel. Love those guys! And we can’t forget Vivastream – a new social network and mobile app that let our attendees connect with the people who match their interests. Anyone who didn’t attend in person can still sign up for a Vivastream account and join in the networking!

Opening Keynote
After lunch, the content began with Michael Gale of PulsePoint Group. He is a recognized industry expert in integrated technology marketing, having founded Strategic Oxygen in 2001, which is widely seen as one of the technology industry’s primary data toolset for marketers. The company was sold to Forrester Research in 2009.

Michael shared industry insights into how executive engage at face to face and virtual events. Notably:
  • 65% of C suite go to vendor events based on a personalized sales invite
  • 30% of Tech influencers who have gone to one physical event will go to another
  • 25% of the follow up from an event involves a hook type of marketing
  • Virtual event only (and not physical event as well) is three times more likely than physical event only
  • Physical and virtual events work equally well (or badly) at each of the awareness – consideration and purchase stages
  • Over 40% of occasions C suite are looking for customer and industry based insights at these events
  • Social and events link extremely well through what we call the Social engagement quadrant
  • C suite and IT only share about 38% of the physical event experience but some 65% of the virtual experience
  • Do not extrapolate from the US to the rest of the world – Asia, EMEA and LATAM - Events
Case Studies

Rinse and Repeat: How Dell prioritized the globalization of event content
The first was by Denise Michaels, event content strategist for Dell’s Small & Medium Business division who has been driving the global rollout of their content consolidation program. They began their content journey in March 2010 with events managed and executed locally, with no centralized view or standardization.

As they audited the presentations that were being given to customers, they labeled them “Frankenstein Presentations;” local sales teams were building their own slides with content pulled from various (not always current) sources.

Event managers were also on their own for events in their region. The regions were disconnected from each other and they were each reinventing the wheel for every event.

To tackle the problem, they broke the plan into four areas:
  • Listen & Learn
    • Connect to customers and providers
    • Recognize pains/needs
  • Solve & Simplify
    • Create reusable, relevant content
    • Make easily accessible
  • Socialize and Market
    • Network, network, network
    • Communicate value constantly
  • Rinse & Repeat
    • Listen, improve
    • Communicate
About a year and a half later, they have now completed the creation of standard invitation, event leave-behinds, standards for room dress, event content, and have begun the roll-out of speaker training. Next stop: the online content portal and event measurement consolidation.

How do you L.I.K.E a company?
Ryan Lewis, social media strategist with The Ferren Agency shared some tips and case studies on social media in live events. He used the acronym L.I.K.E. to showcase his points:
  • Linkable: Content and Understanding/Sharing Ease
    • Using a URL shortener like bit.ly, you can make links usable in social media. But by customizing your URLs, you can give people a clue as to what you’re about to link them out to see (check out this cool short How To video here).
  • Incentivized: Making Tasks Fun
    • The gamification of event content makes engaging with content rewarding! “Game the mundane!” Earn points or baubles that you can redeem for prizes through various interactions like downloading content, checking in to a location, etc.
  • Knowledgeable: Is Learning Easy? Complex Theories?
    • Making difficult concepts simple with infographics and analogies makes attendees more likely to share with others.
  • Exclusive: What Is The Reward For Action?
    • Attendees like to feel like they’re getting something exclusive. Offer things just to them for attending, or offer to them first and let them share with friends and colleagues. Feeling like they are “in the know” is a great way to bring exclusivity to the masses.
Virtually Perfect: Putting Content when and where attendees want it with hybrid events

Chris Meyer, COO of INXPO, shared some great industry insights on virtual and hybrid events. Some snippets:
  • Virtual events are rated as more influential than many social media marketing tactics
  • Hybrid meetings are not a threat to face-to-face, but an opportunity to raise the bar
  • Getting content to attendees who can’t travel is a vital part of a marketing campaign
  • Cisco saved $19m by making their global sales conference hybrid
  • 42% of virtual event attendees are international
  • Data from SAP Sapphire and Cisco Live! shows face-to-face attendee growth driven year over year by offering the content virtually
After our case studies, we tried a fun Town Hall format. Tom Booker and Asaf Ronen from The Institution Theatre led us in some great audience discussion on the topics of:
  • Tradeshow Property: Rent or Buy?
  • Event Apps: Custom build or buy off-the shelf?
  • Roadshows: Dead or Alive?
While there were no definitive answers from the crowd, most prefer the idea of a custom rental for large tradeshow property, they agree that event apps are mostly overrated and don’t provide very much useful engagement beyond the agenda and some feedback mechanisms, and roadshows only work when actively planned and managed by a consistent program leader.

Closing Keynote
We closed the day with GasPedal CEO Andy Sernovitz. With his bag of tricks (ranging from chocolate to Facebook and Twitter earrings to fake mustaches to autographed copies of his book Word of Mouth Marketing, Andy closed out our day with a bang. He shared stories about how to harness the power of the buzz to keep event attendees talking about your event and telling others why they should go.

Some pointers from Andy:
  1. Give people a reason to talk about your stuff
  2. Make it easy for that conversation to take place
Before your event:

Find Big Talkers
  • Get your VIPs in early – celebrity bloggers in your industry
  • Other stakeholders in your event – sponsors/partners
Give them reasons to talk
  • GasPedal gives attendees a welcome box mailed to them including signed copies of books by presenters at the conference
  • GasPedal gives speakers customer shirts with a custom URL – speakers video themselves wearing the shirt and put it online
  • Give sponsors extra passes to share
  • Do audio previews of each speaker and share them online
Give them tools to share
  • Tell-A-Friend campaigns for attendees, speakers, sponsors, VIPs
  • Tweet interesting things that can be retweeted
Give them status
  • Discount code campaigns where you tell people they have “the inside deal” to a discount and let them share it with the people they think should get it
  • Passes to share
During your event:

Social media support
  • Live blog it – so people can just re-blog/re-tweet instead of trying to write while they try to listen
  • Twitter: Hashtags, constant reinforcement, have staff tweet easily retweetable content
Reasons to Talk
  • Surprise your attendees constantly… but not with bad things (like a naked lady covered in sushi as a centerpiece)
  • Half-time show: every heard of BlendTech? What if they did a demo in the middle of your event? Blend a cell phone! Now THAT would get people talking.
  • And, of course, always have great content
Buzzworthy Swag
  • Make sure you are giving away stuff that people will keep like:
    • A genuinely good bag
    • Signed copies of speakers’ books
    • All swag must be travel friendly
Plant post-show conversations
  • Book signing with author + photos shared online
  • Photo booth, other sharable memory-makers
After the event:

The conversation is just starting when the event is over. Capture as much buzz after the show as you capture at the show to build demand for next time.

Post-event content
  • Assign photo album staff and allow it to be user-generated, too. If you get everyone tagging and sharing, you can spread the buzz far!
  • Summaries, trip reports, wrap-up videos that share the content make it super-easy for attendees to reuse or share
  • Record sessions and share snippets to start word of mouth for next year 
  • Share slides from every presentation on slideshare
Post-event community
  • No one has time for a community created just for the event. We’re too busy. But if you keep the conversation where people already are, you can keep the buzz alive
    • Keep it to FB and Linkedin group – often the best because 100% people are there already
    • Share speaker Q&A, discussion of sessions, and networking in those areas or through smaller in-person get-togethers
Post-event experiences
  • Ship the giveaways/handouts/gifts home for the attendees
  • Have videos and content to share with non-attendees
Amazing thank you’s
  • Send something nice to your speakers. GasPedal sends a Carnegie cheesecake!
  • Thank your sponsors with something nice – food! Include the booth workers.
Remember that happy customers are your best ads!

So as you can see from my wrap-up, I was blown away by the stories shared at this event. The networking was great and the content was wonderful. Thank you to our sponsors, our attendees, and our speakers for making this a truly spectacular engagement. Please contact me if you have an interest in learning more about the Corporate Event Marketing Association, our future events, or any of the content we shared.

Monday, September 12, 2011

Does social media make you feel old?

"Facebook is for old people."
   - 14-year-old when asked if she uses Facebook

I was recently at a board of directors meeting for the Corporate Event Marketing Association and attempted to give an overview of my recommended social media plan for the association. For the most part, I was met with blank stares. As I mentioned in a previous post, it seems that many of my high tech event marketing brethren are unschooled in the ways of social engagement.  Meaning they don't know how to tweet, rarely use LinkedIn except to update their resumes, and may not even be on Facebook. Most haven't the slightest idea how or why to be on Google Plus (honestly, I'm still working that one out myself...more to come...).

Social media is no longer simply a shiny object that people use to tout their lunch plans. Social media is another vehicle in a full marketing portfolio to communicate with customers and have a two-way conversation. It's a way to share content and allow customers to generate content of their own. Social media isn't just Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. It's YouTube, Flickr, SlideShare. It's Digg, Wikipedia and Google Docs. It's Four Square, Chatter and Yammer. It's Groupon, Skype, and Yelp. Only heard of a few of those? Yeah... it's tough to keep up. Makes you feel old, doesn't it?

The thing is, if you ask "the young people," they'll tell that you they don't hang out on all of those all day long. They'd never get anything done! But here's a real-life case study of what they do:

They send a birthday party invitation through Evite, and track the potluck foods in Google Docs. They may post to Facebook and Twitter through FourSquare that they're picking up 3 dozen cupcakes from Hey Cupcake, which they bought through Groupon. They might even throw a photo of the delicious 36 cupcakes onto Flickr and post the link on Facebook and Twitter. Videos from the party are quickly uploaded to YouTube from the dozens of smartphones carried by partygoers. And finally, they might Skype their parents to get Happy Birthday greetings from 4 states away.

Even thinking about this is exhausting. But digital natives don't even bat an eye when they read that.

So how do you use this for your events?

You can use social media to drive attendance, and you might even get 2% of registrants from there. But better than just sharing registration links, you can encourage conversation on LinkedIn or Facebook groups. Put teaser videos on YouTube. Set up viral ticketing through your registration site (this encourages the event invitation to be shared by discounting registrants for every shared registration). After the event, put the full presentations on SlideShare. Edit recorded sessions down to a 5 to 8-minute clip or interview speakers to put on YouTube. Create a Flickr stream that people add their photos to and share their experience.

It's not as overwhelming as it may seem when you realize that you can use the social media content channels as they're intended to be used, and not have to assign 24/7 staff to sit around watching a Twitter feed.

Now excuse me while I locate a 14-year-old to explain Google Plus to me...

.

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Building a Bridge Across the Valley of Engagement


Every season has its peaks and valleys. What you have to try to do is eliminate the Grand Canyon.
  - Andy Van Slyke 
I recently attended the first-ever user conference for eTouches and heard a fabulous presentation by Suzanne Carawan on social media and events. As this is obviously my topic du jour, I wanted to share her story and explore it in a series of posts.
This first post explores the possibilities beyond the normal social media plan of Before, During, and After an event.
An event, if used properly, is a vehicle in a comprehensive marketing plan of touchpoints with a customer or potential customer or like-minded group of individuals. The annual conference can be viewed as the Pinnacle of Engagement for most companies, as it brings together in one place a dedicated base of fans eager to learn, share, and engage with your company, product or topic. But if the annual event is the Pinnacle of Engagement, the rest of the year can be called the Valley of Engagement. What we must explore are the strategies and tactics behind building a bridge across the Valley of Engagement from Pinnacle to Pinnacle to keep your tribe active throughout the year.
Most people view social media and event engagement activities as the Trifecta Approach: “before, during, and after.” But in order to build a lasting community base, consider thinking of the plan as the Leveling of Mountains Approach - a continuous circle year over year.

The Trifecta Approach might look like this:

Before the event:
       Event registration site and hypersite
       E-mail blasts for audience acquisition
       Sales enablement to drive attendance
During the event:
       Icebreakers based on social media contests/inquiries/discussions
       Live twitter stream
       Meet the speakers, authors, keynotes
       Mobile app for session updates and wayfinding
After the event:
       Post-event survey
       Blogs
       Photo Galleries
       Archived content

Now consider the Bridge Across the Mountains approach:
Climbing the mountain of engagement:
       Grassroots conversations begin online about the coming event
       Event registration site and hypersite
       E-mail blasts for audience acquisition
       Sales enablement to drive attendance
       Event groups or advisory boards on content
       Industry roundtables to focus the conversation on specific audience sets
       Contests (social/viral/user-generated-content competitions)
       Pre-event attendee directories, and allowing attendees to pre-set meetings with others before the event even begins
       Content teaser videos, vlogs, discussions and blogs
       Creation of pre-event communities to drive connection before attendees get onsite
       Polls, surveys, and conversations about event features that drive attendees to share and talk to each other virtually
       Allow attendees to build a profile, upload a photo, and use that information onsite by printing the photos on the badges, along with things like Twitter names and QR codes that connect attendees to a vCard or address book
       Create Birds of a Feather sessions out of the community members and offer engaged attendees special access to VIP receptions or other perks

The Pinnacle of Engagement
       Ample signage for Birds of a Feather meetup locations
       Physical space for meetups, working groups, birds of a feather conversations
       Special VIP parties, cocktails, rewards
       Live twitter stream
       Scribes per industry, topic, etc
       Meet the speakers, authors, keynotes
       Mobile app that encourages continued engagement at the event through QR codes, acquisition of points for engaging with content (like attending breakout sessions, or downloading white papers, or checking in at a booth or activity)
       Live streaming keynotes

Building a bridge across the valley to make the next climb even shorter:
       Archived content
       Webinars to deep-dive on content sessions
       Blogs to wrap up the event
       Guest blogs from the speaker pool and attendee pool
       Photo Galleries
       Video Testimonials
       Monthly topic discussions and calls born out of the Birds of a Feather sessions
        “Meet the Attendee”: First Timer’s View, etc
       Ongoing community to share perspectives on content and crowdsource topics for upcoming events
       Package event content in an “on the road” format for sales teams to leverage with top accounts – includes videos, collateral, recorded webinars

It requires year-long dedication to keep the engagement, and very few companies have dedicated the resources to make this possible, but in order to truly provide value to customers, the journey must begin with a single step.